We’re all curating folk. Not necessarily with that explicit intention, but through the choices we make about what we talk about and what we leave out.

Folk is interesting, in part, because it’s old and authentic, which makes it necessarily limited. There is, however, a lot to draw from, so, in its raw form, it’s unlikely anyone is going to run out of material any time soon. The problem, however, is that not all folk is universally appealing to contemporary audiences. How you decide on the intrinsic qualities of a particular folk rite or ritual isn’t always clear, but it’s safe to say that a large part of engagement with folk culture now happens by making careful and considered choices about what to show, engage with and talk about. That choice increasingly happens on platforms like Instagram.

As in so many areas, platforms reward those with a knack for choosing well. Some choices are helped along by our interests, but many are shaped by what photographs well, what circulates easily, and what draws the most attention. The other, less obvious incentive is that knowing the right thing, the obscure thing, the thing that signals great taste and depth, brings status. That combination sets this current revival in interest in folk culture apart from what’s gone before.

For one, it produces a narrowing effect as only a very small sliver of the available folk culture sits comfortably at the intersection of aesthetic appeal, social cachet, and platform logic. And, as a result, that overlap begins to define what a wider audience comes to understand as folk.

All of this raises a problem of definition. What do we mean by folk today? Is it inherited ritual? Is it defined as being neither high nor pop culture? Perhaps it’s everyday working culture or simply whatever people do together repeatedly without some kind of institutional ownership. Maybe all of the above. Few people answer the question directly, but the act of curation sort of answers it for us anyway.

There are some grey areas. Of course, projects exclude some practices because they’re too common. Revival projects rarely frame Bonfire Night as ‘folk’, despite being a legitimate folk tradition. Too many people do it for its inclusion in a curated collection to signal expert knowledge. Others fall away because they’re not sufficiently aesthetically appealing. Collectors and revivalists overlooked many traditional songs, for example, in the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s simply because they weren’t musically very striking. Revival culture, it seems, prefers crowd-pleasers over awkward or forgettable material, with the result being that revival culture often sidelines practices that matter mostly to archivists, specialists and nerds. Abstruseness and inaccessibility are never good characteristics for folk movements.

Then, of course, projects exclude some traditions because they’re uncomfortable. Large revival projects rarely mention the Britannia Coconut Dancers, largely because of their association with blackface. Blackface still exists within folk culture. People occasionally debate it, but more often they avoid or ignore it. Omission here is never neutral. It reveals an anxiety about being seen to endorse the ‘wrong’ thing, as having bad taste. Seen together, what projects present as revival often ends up just being curation plus exposure.

These omissions put contemporary projects in a familiar position. Although academic archives should, I think, be collecting culture in its entirety for posterity, selective collecting has always informed what folk comes to mean.

Cecil Sharp and others shaped folk collection in the early twentieth century in ways that supported a particular story. They used it to present an ancient and rural vision of England, even then completely at odds with the real-world geography of Britain. For Sharp, Sharp excluded the folk culture of London and the industrial north, making space for songs which evoked a rural idyll at the heart of a great empire.

The result wasn’t an innocent, incompassionate archive but a bowdlerised version of folk culture. A sanitised ideal emerged that aligned comfortably with Empire and pastoral nationalism. I suppose what matters here isn’t intent but effect. Sharp and his contemporaries reshaped folk to serve a narrative which they wanted told. Miners were out, maidens were in.

I think that the same mechanism is visible again now, though operating through different structures, of course. Instagram doesn’t reward the preservation of everything. On the contrary, it rewards selectivity. The type of visibility and collecting which goes on in Instagram is worlds apart from how legitimate archives manage, categorise, preserve and present content. What emerges on social media is a feedback loop shaped by attention. Aesthetic appeal takes precedence over cultural significance.

Educated, culturally confident, highly mobile people, myself included, now do much of this work. People with time to trawl, read, travel, and post about what they find. This again creates a dangerous sort of circularity where those with time and taste now shape folk culture, not the folk themselves (it puts us on uneasy ground because if folk culture isn’t made by or for the ‘folk’, does its intrinsic value start to quickly fall away). These projects shape culture for audiences, not participants, and often for similarly educated and similarly mobile audiences. Under the guise of preservation, curating folk can often gentrify it. Not just in an intangible, online way, but with real-world impacts too.

The fetishisation of authenticity creates selectivity. Which, in turn, draws attention. Attention draws visitors. Visitors draw money. Tourism and rising costs displace local communities, and, of course, authentic participation thins out.

Perhaps traditional folk culture doesn’t need to be platformed but just left alone. Meanwhile, while our eye is fixed on ancient and aesthetic traditions, songs, dances, rites and rituals, projects leave parts of folk culture behind. And this is the folk culture which may well genuinely benefit from a little more attention. It may even be about to go extinct altogether.

It is obviously possible that nobody set out to save, preserve or revive folk in the first place. Projects don’t always start with such grand ambitions (I know this from experience), but they also don’t always start from the cynical position of gaining followers, fame and wealth. Despite this, there is a marked increase in interest in folk culture and a more and more projects working adjacent to it.

This process has accelerated because of the times we live in. Many people feel disconnected from English identity, and the desire to find something to hold onto is, I think, understandable. The beginnings of this revival of interest in folk culture coincided with Black Lives Matter protests and a public reckoning with Britain’s colonial past. With that history weighing heavily, and Englishness feeling increasingly uncomfortable, Brexit removed a European identity many young, middle-class progressives might have hoped to retreat into. All of this coincided with lockdowns, which meant that more of us were exploring our own countryside and finding meaning and culture much closer to home.

Framed through a folkier, weirder lens, England began to look a little less embarrassing and a little less hostile. Ancient rites were sufficiently pre-colonial, pre-political and safely distant from the far right. This was, perhaps, an English identity which we could get behind. Of course, that sense of safety is largely projected rather than inherent. 

Ancient doesn’t mean neutral, and pre-modern certainly doesn’t mean innocent. Folk has always been political, indeed, on some level it’s what defines it, but contemporary projects largely overlooked this as they took shape. For now, though, monoliths could stand tall, hobby horses could whinny their delight, and Morris dancers could dust off their bells and ribbons proud in their newfound status as symbols of rustic cult chic. Folk was cool, and capital wasn’t far behind.

Folk imagery spread across feeds, posters, t-shirts, and zines, money entered the scene and specialist knowledge became currency. This further incentivised people to share a highly curated selection of folk-related events and customs to an ever-growing audience looking for the overlooked. Projects suddenly showed customs once performed for a village of a hundred people to tens of thousands online. This mixed audience had their own local cultures, but projects presented them with a pretty narrow, curated vision of England, centred largely on the south west, East Anglia, and Yorkshire. What followed was a strange cultural feedback loop where documentation became promotion and promotion began to shape the very thing being documented. If all we end up seeing is the Padstow May Day celebrations, is that all there is to see?

Curating folk isn’t a neutral act. Unlike some forms of culture, folk culture doesn’t exist to be shared or displayed. Even for curators, quite the opposite is true – a ritual’s unknown-ness provides the curator the irresistible opportunity of becoming its discoverer, the first person from civilised culture to step foot on savage land. Folk in its truest sense isn’t created for an audience, nor does it ask to be explained or observed. Curation changes that relationship. It introduces hierarchies, projects omit things, and curation turns living culture into something people lift out of context and consume.

Where we are today, visibility is the central issue, I think. Folk practices are often deliberately small and local, and so online circulation changes scale in an instant. What was ephemeral and local becomes permanent and suddenly global. And I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.

There are, however, lots of examples where visibility can genuinely help survival. While we’re all desperate to give our attention to something, existing everyday folk institutions are disappearing and certainly do need help. One pub closes every day in the UK. 

Working men’s clubs are nearing extinction. There’s no meaningful right to roam in this country. These are just three examples where treasured aspects of British folk culture are in the process of changing and would benefit from someone shouting about it. The biggest single issue, however, is that the structures which underpin folk culture are eroding. People can’t afford to live in the towns they were born in, food is more expensive and local communities are being hollowed out for tourism.

These aren’t romantic survivals – the legacy of a long forgotten, highly aesthetic, newly rediscovered and visually exciting tradition which stretches back into the annals of history. These are ordinary, workaday, boring, unglamorous, and deeply cultural. I suppose they just happen to be harder to sell t-shirts of.

If folk culture is about how people actually live together, then these losses matter a lot. The question is why so much revival energy is directed towards what photographs well rather than what is materially under threat. There’s a crisis happening now.

As with most things, money makes it all worse. Once curated, folk culture becomes legible to institutions, investors and big brands. The result is that value flows towards those who curate the culture, while communities often see very little return. This doesn’t require bad faith. In my experience, most folk revival projects are extremely well meaning, but they follow incentives in front of them, as we all do. All of this amounts to slow, authentic, local culture being contorted into a shape it was never supposed to bend into. Money, visibility and selectivity all have the potential to be extremely damaging to folk culture, and it isn’t clear how much the weird yearly ritual of a tiny fishing village can sustain the attention of the whole of Instagram, nor whether the participants even want it.

As with so many issues in this country, class sits underneath all of it. Although the crises happening now and impacting everyone’s ability to live a comfortable life, those with the means to curate are rarely those who bear the consequences when places change. This is perhaps worth remembering.

Folk culture has always travelled, changed, and been documented. What’s different now is obviously scale, the speed at which it spreads, and how that difference increases responsibility.

One obvious answer is to try to move away from curation and towards creation. That’s easier said than done. It’s one thing to promote and thoughtfully discuss a folk ritual you’ve come across, quite another to create a new festival altogether. But people are doing it. The Black Shuck Festival, the Earl of Rhone, and the Hastings Jack in the Green are new (or at least relatively new) traditions with all the flair of the old and yet arguably much better equipped to deal with lots of attention. Wassailing is a good example of a broader practice that has been genuinely revived through creation. There are now wassails up and down the country and throughout cities where only 50 years ago it was all but extinct in practice. People have taken the template and made it their own.

With all of that in mind, I suppose the real question isn’t whether folk even needs to be collected and curated? When engagement becomes the organising principle, and projects treat visibility as a good in itself, you lose the authenticity which drives that engagement and visibility in the first place. Perhaps the best thing to do then is just leave things alone.

That means accepting some limits. Accepting that not everything needs to be shown or even understood. It also means recognising that some practices lose their meaning when they travel too far or too fast. And that the responsibility of being involved might sometimes mean stepping back, or, if we must revive culture through curation, perhaps we can look more closely at that which would genuinely benefit from our attention.